Altered Fluid on The Hour of the Wolf

That title probably makes absolutely no sense unless you’re a writer of speculative fiction in New York…

Altered Fluid is my weekly writer’s group, which is great for critiquing stories on the road to getting them published. Pretty much everyone in the group is published, most professionally, and the critiques are always useful, and the people are a blast.

Hour of the Wolf is a radio show in New York that covers speculative fiction topics, usually interviews with authors. This week, they featured my writing group. Alas, I was not present, or even conscious, as the “Hour” starts at 5am and I can barely take a taxi to the airport at that ungodly hour.

But the rest of the group performed admirally (Kris was even kind enough to yell at me to GET UP from the radio). They discuss writing groups, but also show you a live session of critiquing a brand new story on the air. So for anyone who’s ever wondered what it’s like to get your story critiqued, here’s a sample of how it’s done right.

http://archive.wbai.org/pls.php?mp3fil=7741

For anyone wanting to know how it’s done wrong, you can sit in on any of the writing groups I tried but didn’t join, where people literally yell at you for making mistakes. Altered Fluid is professional enough to realize the point is to improve the story, not show how smart one is or waste time on nitpicking.

The mostly weekly schedule of Altered Fluid (generally, 3 times a month) is also good for filtering people who aren’t quite as serious about writing. This schedule pretty much requires everyone to read nine or so short stories per month and write a new one every month or two. Many members of the group also participate in editing Sybil’s Garage, which requires some major slush reading I don’t personally have the time for. Sybil’s Garage, btw, is opening for submissions for the next volume this Monday.